


Sea Change

by Dien



Category: Aquaman (2018)
Genre: Bad Sex, First Time, Loss of Virginity, M/M, May/December Relationship, Mentor/Protégé, Power Dynamics, Royalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 12:53:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17284424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: Everything changes in time.





	1. Chapter 1

Beneath the waves, there are no reflections. It takes the surface-- that strange dividing line, at once so easily permeable and yet so absolute-- to make such a thing, to look at water from _outside_ it and to see one's self painted on the surface, like a projection. One's self, but different. Altered, flipped.

After Atlanna is taken away and given to the Trench, Nuidis Vulko's life becomes a doubled one, a warped reflection. As below, so above. But with differences.

He is Orvax's trusted advisor, sworn loyal to the throne: Vulko the Clever, they call him. (In Atlantis, a backhanded compliment: cleverness is valuable, but strength is moreso, and Nuidis Vulko seeks always to avoid open confrontation, seeks always a more devious path. He is _clever,_ yes; it would be better if he were fierce.) So when Orvax says, _train my son,_ there is no option for refusal, and even if there were the option he would not take it. It is his duty, to train the heir to the throne.

And it is also his duty, to Atlanna-- friend of his youth, sharer of all the secrets they each told no one else-- to help her sons. To teach not just Orm, but Arthur _(Ar-thur;_ could she not have given him an Atlantean name? he thinks, on more than one occasion), as best he can, when he can. The boy's existence is a crime-- a blasphemy-- but it is not Arthur's fault that he was born... to a union that followed the heart more than it did laws, or good sense.

No more than it is Orm's fault that he was born to a loveless marriage, in which the heart played no role at all.

Dark and light, the boys grow, as different as the Atlantic from the Pacific (and yet those are both still oceans, and so the half-brothers are reflections--) and Vulko sees them both. At their best, and at their worst.

Arthur: hot-headed, blunt, quick to laugh and quick to anger. The boy's heart rages like the surf: his ego is easy to wound and his temper rises at any imagined slight, but when the wave recedes, the sand is smooth.

Orm: watchful, calculating, earnest and driven, struggling always to be the warrior prince that Orvax demands he be. Yet the smallest praise makes him smile, and that smile is Atlanna's, and seeing it on her son's face cuts Vulko to the quick.

Arthur: His Atlantean blood is quick to show, and having near a man's height by his twelfth year makes him a target for those who wish to prove their own strength. He has no shortage of anger to answer their sallies: the anger of a boy whose mother went away and never came back, the anger of a boy who doesn't belong.

Orm: His father condemned his mother to death. Vulko watches him wrestle with it, watches the boy seal his confused agony behind a face as smooth and set as one of the city's statues, watches the kindness that Atlanna tried to teach him rankle into cold hatred for a half-fictional half-brother a thousand miles away. So much easier to blame an unknown stranger than one's own father, one's own king.

Arthur: Vulko teaches him the trident and the blade and Arthur is a storm: wild and strong, aimless, impressive but undisciplined. He doesn't have enough _time_ with Arthur-- these stolen days, here and there, when his duties let him slip away unseen. Arthur learns bad habits, and nothing of defense, and Vulko _tries_ but the gods know Arthur is not a patient student. And when, at last, he tells Arthur the terrible truth... then, Arthur is no longer patient at all. The training stops. Arthur is loosed into the surface world half-finished, knowing just enough to be dangerous.

Orm: Vulko teaches him the trident and the blade and Orm is calm, intent, determined. He does not love the art of war for its own sake, which heartens Vulko, but the lack of Orvax's bloodthirstiness does not mean that Orm is a pacifist. For Orm it is all a means to an end. He learns because it is required of him. Because he will be king, and a king must know war as he must know many things. Orm learns steadily; Orm fights steadily. Eventually, inevitably, Orm scores his first touch in their sparring, and when he tells Orm, _well done, my prince,_ there is a moment of Orm-the-little-boy again. The shy smile, Atlanna's smile-- before it disappears again beneath the marble visage, a measured nod, a formal answer, _thank you, Vulko_.

(Arthur never thanked him. Arthur's way was claps on the back, boyish teasing. They are so different, so different.)

When Arthur is thirteen he knocks down another boy with a shove; he cracks two of the boy's ribs. Vulko teaches him how to pull his punches with the fragile land-dwellers, but is never successful at teaching him that sometimes one ought not punch at all.

When Orm is thirteen he is chastised by his father for being too weak to wrestle a hippocamp to saddle, lectured as feeble in front of half the court, and Vulko watches the boy stand straight through it all though his pale cheeks stain pink. And later Vulko follows Orm to where he is punching a coral reef with his bare fists, and tells him the trick of getting a hippocamp to bear the bit, that it is not how _hard_ you hold them but where, and Orm listens, his eyes thirsty for every edge and every lesson.

When Arthur is fifteen he kisses a girl, or tries to, and it is a disaster. Vulko explains to him courtship and charm-- with increasing frustration, as Arthur's answers of 'Human girls aren't LIKE that' are something he cannot counter and, indeed, cannot absolutely say are wrong. He is forced, in the end, to say, _Ask your father_ , and Arthur heaves a great sigh over the notion that Tom Curry might know anything at all about women. Vulko rejoins that Tom Curry seemed to know how well enough how to win a queen, and this is a mistake, because Arthur's eyes go bitter-gold at the mention of his mother, and Arthur storms off.

When Orm is fifteen he composes a poem for Princess Y'mera, scrupulously adhering to the seven-line stanzas of classical Atlantean verse. He asks Vulko to proofread it; Vulko informs him it is technically flawless but that, perhaps, it sounds a bit mechanical, a bit empty. Orm accepts the criticism and rewrites it; the subsequent drafts are no better, but Vulko cannot bring himself to suggest additional revisions. Orm has done the best he can and it's not as if Y'mera has the choice to _not_ be courted, after all. The marriage was negotiated by Orvax and Nereus as soon as the genders of the yet-unborn children were known: a great union, a peaceful merging of two kingdoms that have been too often at war. For the greater good, the two will be wedded-- and at least they're of an age, Vulko thinks, at least they have grown up knowing each other, even playing together when they were smaller. It isn't like Atlanna, with Orvax twenty years her senior.

Perhaps there won't be passion, but affection, yes, hopefully, for both their sakes. Affection, and an heir. That is important as well. That is duty...

Duty. And what if duty pulls at cross-purposes, like tide and opposing backtide? Vulko is caught between conflicting currents, between the water and the land. Arthur has the heart to be a better king than Orvax (a lump of coral might have the heart to be a better king than Orvax, he cannot help but think, and then promptly drowns that treasonous thought). But not the patience or the shrewdness. And Orm has those things in abundance. Orm has the lineage. Orm has the education. Orm has the skills...

To a scribe's eye, Orm is the better choice, Vulko knows.

Is it only his loyalty to Atlanna, to her heart's choice, that draws him so to Arthur? That makes him think, as he watches a teenaged Orm play at politics and build his own alliances, that Arthur would be _better?_ The sharks of the royal court would eat him alive, because Arthur knows nothing of intrigue; this is Orm's element. By every metric Orm is the better candidate-- every metric other than this indefinable one, this immeasurable one, this intangible called _love._ That one of them was born of love, and it stains everything about him like the markings on his skin, and that the other was born of duty. And duty, as Vulko could well tell you, is as cold and unrelenting as the ocean's deepest chasms.

He dreams that the two princes might somehow be amalgated. The needful qualities seem to have been split between them, divided unevenly between two souls and two bodies, and if only Atlanna could have loved Orvax (if only Orvax could have been someone lovable) then she would never have left, and there would be one heir, one child, the best of both Arthur and Orm.

But Vulko does not dwell in fantasies. He is a practical man, and while he keeps his promise to Atlanna, he knows that Arthur _is_ a fantasy, a false hope, the lure-light of an anglerfish. He knows also that his increasingly rare contact with Arthur inevitably paints Arthur in a better light: it is Orm that he sees daily, as both brothers leave youth behind to become men, and so it is Orm in whom he notices every flaw, every instance of spite or cruelty. If Arthur were _here_ there would no doubt be just as much to vex him, he tells himself.

Orm is here, and Orm will be king, and Vulko's duty is still to the throne. If Orm will be king, then Vulko will see that Atlanna's second son is served as well as he can manage it.

And he will give him what he can of that intangible, that one thing the prince of Atlantis lacked after his mother's death: love.

***

And then Orvax is dead, and Orm is king. He is twenty years old.

***

The funeral, and the coronation, has been the work of seven days. Couriers, messages, the body lying in state, tributes given and received, endless speeches, the ceremonies observed for the new crowning, the presentation of the trident, the cremation in a sacred lava vent-- on and on and on, and Orm has shouldered the interminable public appearances always with a steady and measured countenance. And Vulko thinks to himself, _good_ , because now, he can abandon the notion that was ever in the back of his head, that someday, Arthur might come to them, and be king: it is Orm now, undeniably it is Orm, _what_ _might have been_ has given way to what has now happened. The current has carried him past the choice that would have been treason. And his duty is plain: to serve the king, and to help him be the best that he can be. He takes a knee with all the rest, and when he swears his allegiance, he means every word.

Finally it is done, and Prince Orm is, now, King Orm. The last of the servants and the court are gone, and it is only Vulko who sees the abrupt slump of Orm's shoulders when the door finally shuts, the weariness that spreads across Orm's statue-handsome face.

He chuckles despite himself, and Orm starts.  
  
“--Vulko.” The tension returns immediately to the shoulders of the new king, and Vulko regrets that. “--I thought you gone with all the others.”

He shakes his head. “No, my pr-- my king. If you wish it, of course. Forgive me. I did not laugh out of disrespect. Only that I saw your father look similar, over the years.”

Conflicting emotions dancing across Orm's face like seaweed carried by the current. Vulko is good at reading people, one of those skills that makes men call you _clever;_ he perceives that some part of Orm wishes to assert his new crown, to bristle at the familiarity. Another part of him desperately wants the old normalcy to stay. Vulko says nothing, his eyes on the floor with the suggestion of deference but with no more bow to him than that: it is Orm, now, who has to decide the shape of things between them, who has to say what he will and will not accept from his former teacher, his new advisor.

After a long moment Orm relaxes into the throne, a rueful half-smile slowly spreading over his face. “Did he, really?”

“Yes. Usually with more swearing,” Vulko says drily, and is rewarded with a laugh, a short near-silent one, Orm's laugh, which he has not heard in years. (Arthur laughs in great, booming chortles. A laugh he also has not heard in years.)

“I can imagine it,” Orm says, and hesitates, and then lifts the crown from his head. And then he holds it in both hands, unsure where exactly it is supposed to go.

“Allow me.” Vulko slides through the water and gracefully takes the helm of gold and pearls from Orm's hands; he lifts it to the barely-noticable shelf behind the throne. Orm watches him, brows faintly furrowed, and moves his hands to his own head, to rub at his temples, his forehead.

“It's... surprisingly heavy. And pointy.”

“I wouldn't know,” Vulko acknowledges. “But you look tired, my king. Tomorrow is another day,” (Orm groans) “and what would serve you best is a soak in the thermals...”

Orm groans again, this time with raw longing. “Gods, yes.”

Vulko chuckles. “I'll ready the chamber, then.”

“That's servants' work,” Orm protests, and lowers his hands, halfway to reaching for the shell by which he might call an attendant. “You're a royal cousin. And a warden of the deep, no less.”

“Among my other ranks, yes. But ultimately I am the servant of the king,” he answers, and places his hand atop Orm's before the shell is sounded. “Let me help, Orm.”

Orm's eyes dart to his, and again the emotions mix like two ocean layers across his face: _do I rebuke him for the use of my name? Do I take comfort in the idea that nothing has really changed?_

The latter wins out. Orm nods, once, and Vulko bows, and swims down the hall that leads to the thermal vents.

***

He helps Orm out of his ceremonial armor, and then the clothes beneath those, and Orm exhales as the super-heated water of the bathing chamber blasts over his skin from all sides.

“I took the liberty of adding in whale's milk, sea fennel, and red algae,” Vulko says with a gesture at the marble containers that line the walls. “Relax. Let the heat sink down into your bones.”

Orm doesn't argue. He drifts down onto one of the carved stone benches, bubbles jetting out around him from the pressure of the hot water rising, and lets his head roll back, his limbs adrift with the room's spiraling currents, his eyes drooped shut.

Despite himself, despite his better judgment, Vulko looks. Orm is pale like his mother, finally grown into his height and filling out his formerly gangly limbs with solid muscle. It is not the first time that Vulko has thought him like a statue: smooth and chiseled. It's just that it's the first time he's thought it of his body as well as his face. In this moment, he looks his fill, drinking in the sight of Orm's bare form, graceful and strong and unscarred.

After a minute, or perhaps it is five, Orm's eyes slit open, blue-gray like the sea's surface on a clouded day. For a handful of seconds his gaze is unfocused. And then he does focus, on Vulko, and Vulko turns away, busying himself with folding the king's sharkskin robe and stowing it in one of the wall niches.

“You must be tired as well,” Orm says from behind him. “You have worked at least as hard as I have.”

He concedes the point with a shrug, and reaches for the sealed jars of oils, the sponges on their bone handles. “I've more experience at this than you.”  
  
“I'm younger,” Orm counters.

“Oh, yes, I'm ancient as Poseidon himself, I forgot. You _do_ know that I'm younger than your father was, by twenty years, yes?”

“But of an age with my mother,” says Orm, and Vulko is silent, for Orm hasn't brought his mother up in half a dozen years. Atlanna is not spoken of, at court.

“A few years older,” he says when he can speak again. “We grew up together, more or less.”

Orm's eyes are on the far wall now, not on him. “What do you think it was that ruined her?”

He is speechless twice in less than twenty seconds: it is not a state that Vulko the Clever often experiences. He clears his throat to buy time; he pretends to look through the oils. “Ruined her, my king? She was... she was much changed by her time... above.”

Orm's lips press into a thin line. “Yes. But I mean before the-- human. She abandoned her duty: that is where the trouble started. What in her went-- wrong? That she left in the first place?”

Vulko runs his fingers along the mouth of a jar, the metal of the cunning mechanism that will release oils without flooding the rest of the container. “The marriage was not... to her tastes. She and your father had... little in common,” he says eventually, diplomatic as ever. It is better than saying, _She hated your father; she once told me she would kill him before she would be wed to him._

Orm's face betrays no reaction to the carefully worded answer. Vulko is as sensitive to the moods of those around him as a floating jelly is to the current, but in this instant he can read nothing in Orm's blank face. It is as if assuming the throne has allowed to Orm to complete the last step of some obscure ritual, and transformed him wholly into one of the statues of the ancients he has tried so hard to emulate.

Vulko holds up a jar of oil before the silence can stretch too long. “The sea holly, or...?”

Orm's eyes track back to him, down to the jar, indifferent weariness shading his gaze. “...that's fine.”

“Yes, sire.” He presses the nozzle into the sponge, and fills the sponge with the thick cleansing oils, the product of crushed sea holly and a nutrient-rich green algae. He holds it out, but Orm seems not to notice, his eyes returned to the wall, half-shut.

It is Vulko's turn to hesitate. He takes a breath, and then he takes the coward's path, the safer path. “Shall I call one of the household to cleanse you?”

Orm leans further back, his throat bared, his eyes drifting to near slits. “I thought you were the one against my calling the servants.”

His tone is casual; he almost seems half-asleep. But because Orm is so rarely casual, Vulko sees the camouflage of relaxation for what it is; look, now, Orm's eyes are watching him, a tiny glint, a fractional gleam beneath pale lashes. Orm waits. Orm waits to see what he will do, as the ambush predator waits to see if the prey will swim closer.

Vulko stands still a moment, while the sponge oozes thick and oily gel between his tensed fingers. And then he nods, a not-quite-bow, and says, “Of course, my king,” and then there is nothing to do but press the sponge to the flat planes of Orm's chest. To serve, as he had said, in whatever capacity he is needed.

Vulko the Clever feels a blind way forward, in these new and uncharted waters.

What does Orm play at? One explanation is obvious: the king tests his new power, by means of this small and mundane task that all the same Vulko would prefer not to be doing. Is it as simple as that? That Orm sensed his ambivalence as a shark senses blood, and that Orm simply wishes to drive his own promise of service back at him via this trivial matter? Vulko likes this theory: it is straightforward, it is reasonable, it matches what he has seen of Orm when the prince has reminded others of his rank and power in subtle ways. It satisfies on logical grounds, and it does not threaten Vulko's reality in any particular way.

But is it correct?

He draws the sponge down Orm's nearer arm, with the care and attention to detail that has always marked his service to the royal family. A long arm, well-formed, firmly muscled. From solid bicep to inner elbow, and then the corded sinews of his forearm, and then his hand, which is callused from reins and from a trident's shaft.

“Did you ever do _this_ for my father, then?” Orm asks, and Vulko's eyes dart like a minnow to Orm's face, but the king's eyes are closed again, and his face again gives away nothing.

“No,” Vulko says, careful to keep his own tone casual, light. “He had more... preferred members of the staff for such things.” A beat and a pause, deliberate insertion of wryness when he adds on: “Young and beautiful women, mostly.”

Orm doesn't laugh, as Vulko had meant for him to do. Orm simply nods, and lets Vulko move his pliant arm, lift it, scrub it clean. Vulko is aware of the firmness of his young king's muscle beneath his own palms, the solidity of his bones, the easy power in his body even in relaxation. Vulko is very aware of these things.

He works in silence, and Orm does not speak to break it. When his hand brushes the lee of Orm's shoulder, the king leans forward, baring his back: the powerful curve of his spine, his skin pinkened from the heat of the water, rippled with indentations from the stone seat. Vulko draws the sponge across his king's back, along the nape of his neck, down the knobbed line of his spine which makes him think of nothing so much as a sea serpent just below the surface. Down, and down, and now he is at the small of Orm's back, that last dip before the flesh curves out again as natural as a shoreline, into muscular buttocks...

Back up, Vulko thinks. Up is good. He can swim to Orm's other side, and do the further arm.

Orm's fingers catch against his body as he passes before him, snag on the fabric of his own garment (eelskin, still faintly luminescent, studded with abalone beads). Orm looks at him.

“There's no reason you ought be dressed,” Orm remarks, so bluntly it seems reasonable, even as his hand falls away again. “You might as well soak in the thermals too.”

New and uncharted waters indeed... Vulko _studies_ his king, seeking a clue, any clue, behind the face of a man half his age, but Orm is a cipher. Can this really be the same boy he has known for all of that boy's life?

“I shall see to my bathing after yours, sire,” he demurs, and settles on Orm's other side to begin there.

“I would prefer you do it now.”

A silence in the thermal chamber, quiet except for the turbines within the stone walls that pump the near-scalding water to them both. Vulko is motionless, his hand frozen on Orm's broad shoulder.

“And I would prefer to remain dressed, my king. If it pleases you.”

Orm moves, swift with the speed of youth (which is not to say that he could not dodge if it he tried; he is not as young as he once was, no, but he has also not taught Orm _all_ his cunning. But it is not politic--), and seizes his wrist, firmly. Blue eyes lock onto his own, blue, yes, but the sea can be blue and yet dangerous.

“It does _not_ please me, warden. Disrobe. This is the order of your king.”

Vulko's own eyes are green; he locks gaze with Orm a long moment, the fierce blue and the steady green waters swirling against each other, and his pulse beats against Orm's iron fingers. Vulko lowers his eyes first, and then his head, a dip of deference.

“Your will is mine. Sire.”

Only then does the hand release him.

Vulko steps back, and manages to make the gesture nothing more than a graceful readjustment of his position. He keeps his eyes on the wall as he undoes the catches of polished mollusk, and peels his own snug tunic off his body. He was already aware of the heat of the water; with the tunic gone it goes from an abstraction to a blistering full-body _immediacy;_ the water is hot, hot enough that were they not both Atlanteans of noble blood, whose bodies can stand the deepest pressures and the most frigid seas-- and, yes, also the hottest-- they would cook slowly in their own skins.

Orm is watching him. Vulko is aware of it, aware of the ice-blue eyes taking in his every motion. _And to what purpose, Orm?_ he wants to ask, in the critical voice of a teacher, the same tone with which he had interrogated the younger Orm's exercises in rhetoric. _How have I wronged you, that you want now to humiliate me with my weakness, Orm? Are you so like your father as all that?_

He can pass his flush off as the heat, at least, and whatever else, Vulko keeps his movements to the same deliberate and steady grace he always manages. He lives by the way of water: water adapts, adjusts, is not overcome. If Orm means to humiliate him, so be it; he can only be humiliated if he allows himself that mental state. Water permits all things to pass through it.

So he removes his slippers, and his trousers, and folds them, and stows them, and at last hangs in the water before Orm just as naked, with the evidence of his _awareness_ of his king on display. He spreads his hands lightly at his sides, empty, as if to say, _Here I am._

“You see I have followed your orders, sire,” he says, and he tells himself that he is ready for the contempt that will be in Orm's eyes (he has seen it there more and more often, lately, aimed at others). For revulsion, for disgust, for mockery. These things will pass through him. Be as the water. If Orm names him a filthy and aging lech, to be so stirred by bathing the body of a man he cannot hope to have, a man he is old enough to have fathered and who he half-raised anyway... then he will accept it. _Be as the water, Nuidis Vulko; you have heard worse said about you._

Orm is silent.

After what seems an eternity, Vulko dares lift his gaze. It is to find... other than what he expected. The statue's facade has crumbled again: it is not ice in Orm's blue eyes, but heat. And more than that: doubt, hesitation, private misery.

Uncharted waters, and a new current; Vulko's mind races as he sets to mapping this sea-change.

“...my king?” he begins, and Orm snaps his gaze away.  
  
“...Orm,” he says next, and no matter the breadth of his shoulders or the height he has attained, something in Orm's body seems young indeed as the new king wraps an arm around himself, fractionally hunches his shoulders in tight defense against the criticism that was so often given by Orvax. Vulko has seen that gesture often enough.

“Orm,” he says again, soft, and slowly sinks to one knee in the water, gazing up at him from the floor of the thermal chamber, a reflection of how he had knelt before Orm earlier today. “Sire. How may I serve you?”

A fine shudder runs through the king of Atlantis's bared body. Orm's eyes dart to him, away, back to him again. Orm licks his lips. “I desire pleasure.”

Vulko inclines his head, gazing at Orm from under his lashes. “Shall I call one of the household skilled in such arts, to serve you?”

A negating jerk of Orm's pale head, his silver-gold hair beginning to drift from its styled stiffness after immersion in the heat. His eyes are fixed on Vulko's, his pupils blown huge and dark. “No. No. I don't-- want that.”

His own hands drift through the water, graceful, easy. He touches Orm's knee: the faintest brush of his knuckles against smooth skin. Orm _twitches_.

“Tell me. My king.”

Orm breathes in, short and harsh. His hand shoots out once more-- to the back of Vulko's head, to grip there, rough, demanding, eager. Orm hauls his head closer. “Your mouth. Give me-- Vulko, give me your mouth--”

Even if there were the option for refusal, he would not take it.

“Your will is mine,” he breathes, and then his head is in Orm's lap, and his king is eager, indeed.

Orm is _hot,_ his flesh warmed by the thermal waters, his pulse hammering frantic under Vulko's exploratory tongue. Orm's hand fumbles, clumsy, very unlike his usual precision; Vulko's dark hair is wrenched from its tie, and Orm's big hand grabs at the escaping strands. It stings. He ignores it. Orm is making... _noises,_ loud noises, _raw_ noises, and the sounds do nothing at all to calm Vulko's own desire. Prince Orm-- _King_ Orm-- raises his voice only to give orders on the field of battle; in conversation he is measured, restrained. Even when he is sarcastic, or cold-- and he often is-- he is in control of himself and his reactions.

Save for now. Orm gasps. Vulko glances up, and Orm's head is thrown back, his throat working convulsively, his blue eyes wide, his mouth shaping a soundless _oh_ of shock. The hand not fisted in Vulko's hair is gripping the edge of the stone bench so hard that Orm's knuckles stand out bone white.

And all this for a bit of calculated tongue-work, Vulko thinks, with a shred of amusement that is perhaps unkind. Perhaps the memory of Orm ordering him to undress is still raw. Perhaps. But what will Orm do when he takes him full-on into his mouth....? _There's_ a question, for a clever man to learn the answer to.

...the answer appears to be: to come, with the force of a hammerhead shark.

Orm bucks convulsively, and the sting in Vulko's scalp becomes a bright sharp red pain, compounded by having his ruler's hips smashed into his face with bruising force. The king is suddenly buried to his hilt in Vulko's mouth, in a motion as abrupt as it is deep, giving him hot salt with his motions, and Vulko cannot help but choke, grace or no grace.

He reels back, or he would; Orm's strong hand holds him in place, gripping him with a force both powerful and oblivious. Orm makes wrecked noises above him, but the charm of that novelty is gone-- Vulko's eyes narrow and it is he who grabs Orm's wrist, this time, his thin strong fingers digging in with the precision of a swordfish to hunt the ulnar nerve.

Orm's orgasmic bellow transmutes into a shocked mewl of pain. Vulko prises the suddenly limp hand off his own head and pulls back, coughing, grimacing. Strands of his own hair trail from Orm's fingers, and he can taste a trace of his own blood in the water as they pass.

“My _king,”_ he rasps out, and if he is honest he knows where Orm learnt sarcasm, because Vulko can use it more deftly than old Orvax ever did, and he does so now, he makes the honorific a scathing rebuke. He spits; he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Have I _displeased_ you?”

Orm's face is blank idiocy: non-comprehension, fuzzed by his own pleasure, that bliss that makes any man a fool. Vulko exhales, and tilts his head to find the bleeding spot on his scalp, tucking his own hair back to show it; touching at his nose as if to test if it is broken.

“That was quite the punishment, my king; might I know my offense?”

To Orm's credit, his confused shock passes quickly enough. Changing emotions dance over his face as swift as new waves follow old: a wide-eyed horror, chased by shame, followed by a sudden shuttering-- the defensive battening of the hatches, oh, but he knows it so _well_ on Orm-- and finally the hunkering down behind the wall, the wall of his attempted stoicism.

“I-- I was perhaps too energetic for you, I see,” Orm begins, his spine straight. Vulko isn't having it.

“You fucked my mouth like a human sailor does his doxy,” he spits out, and Orm's eyes widen as much for his blunt coarseness as the indecency of what he describes. Vulko thinks he has never once used profanity before that Orm could hear. The court is a place of formal language, after all, and Vulko a skilled practicioner of the bland comment, the choice phrase. Well, by Hades, after that stunt, Orm can hear 'fucking' and more!

“Are you a king of the house of Orv, or are you a bull walrus in his first rutting!? You showed as much grace there, Orm!”

Orm flushes, a furious red that stains him like a lobster. He opens his mouth to rejoin, and then he shuts it with a click of his sharp white teeth, and surges to his feet in a swirl of sea fennel and algae powders. The king shoves past him, and doesn't stop for his clothes: he cranks the chamber's door, and before Vulko has even gotten to his feet Orm is out the room, the wake of his passage rustling anemone-lamps like an underwater quake.

Vulko grimaces. And sighs, and stands: feeling at his tender, burning scalp, collecting his own clothes.

He has his trousers half on when he grasps what exactly just happened, and then, Nuidis Vulko feels anything but clever, and says something quite profane indeed.


	2. Chapter 2

At least he can follow Orm by scent; there is a trace of the fennel and the holly, the whale's milk and Orm's own pleasure. These things hang in the water behind Orm, and quickly enough shall be absorbed into the whole of the ocean's rich panoply, but for now they give him a path. Vulko follows it, pausing here and there to open his mouth and better taste the water, to confirm whether Orm took left or right, up or down, through the curving, labyrinthine corridors of the nautilus palace.

The trail leads him to Orm's rooms-- not the king's chambers, still filled with Orvax's possessions and trophies-- but _Orm's_ rooms, the rooms that were his as a prince. Vulko is thankful that at this hour guards stand only at the palace's entrance: what the gossip should be if someone saw the new king streak nude for his old rooms, and his right-hand arrive some minutes later, he doesn't want to imagine.

He hangs before the doors; he takes a breath. He knocks.

Silence.

Vulko bows his head. “My king,” he says, low-voiced, respectful. Orm's pride will have been so stung.

But Orm doesn't answer, and Vulko sighs, leans forward until his head rests against the smooth polished chitin of the doors. “Sire, however little it may please you, we must speak.”

Still silence; Vulko considers that the windows from Orm's rooms are many, that nothing stops Orm from having simply slipped out into the greater sea. Nothing dictates that Orm must needs _be_ in his rooms just now, simply because the trail led here.

Think. If he were Orm, currently nursing humiliation and stinging words, where would he go?

...And so he finds Orm, half-an-hour later, at the coral reef that he battered at as a boy, after the incident of the hippocamp. He can feel and hear Orm before he can see him: hear the dull cracking of calcium carbonate, and feel through the water the tiny concussive shocks, little ripples against his skin. He considers, and swims to approach from the other side, where he has cover. Vulko parts the water like an eel, twisting silently in, until he observes Orm through the reef's thousand holes.

At least Orm deigned to take a tunic from his chambers, Vulko thinks with thin humor. This conversation would be worse to hold naked.

Orm is striking at the reef, his face still red, suffused with anger and embarrassment. The coral skeleton cracks and splinters under his blows; Vulko watches Orm run through a drill that he himself taught Orm, a meditation of the body. It doesn't seem to be calming the king.

“Orm,” he says, and for the second time tonight Orm starts.

“Leave me,” is the instant response, delivered through gritted teeth.

“My king, I cannot.”

“And why can you not follow your king's orders, warden of the deep, so-called servant of the throne?”

“Because my king requires counsel.”

“ _I do not want your counsel!”_ Orm punctuates this with a kick that shatters orange coral into grainy fragments, scatters them through the water like a miniature explosion, and Vulko watches the pebbles drift down to the seabed. He sighs. He is suspended in the water next to the reef now, his legs crossed, his hands inscribing slow scoops in the water in a rhythmic figure-eight to keep himself from sinking lower. The motions calm him. Think, Vulko, think. He is supposed to be good at this, after all. Vulko and his _clever_ tongue.

“And yet you might be served by my apology, sire.”

Orm flashes a sidelong look at him at that, blazing blue eyes narrowed. “I want _nothing_ of your _service_. I want to be alone, do you hear me? I order you to leave me be, Vulko!”

He exhales. Orm is too raw from it. That marble visage he shows the world comes at a cost: everything else squeezed inside it, the pressure of the very sea bottom brought to bear to crush all the anger and the fear down into a tight and secret lump. Tonight he cracked Orm's facade. Orm will need time. Part of him wants to grab Orm, to shake him, as he did once in a great while when the boy Orm was speaking in a way sure to draw Orvax's ire; another part of him wishes to take Orm into his arms and hold him, as he did when Orm was younger yet and still cried over his mother's absence.

But Orm is king, now.

“Your will is mine, sire,” he whispers, and he withdraws, twisting away in the water. He is thirty feet away when Orm's voice assaults his shoulders.

“I trusted you!”

There are so many responses he might make to that. Vulko stops swimming; he closes his eyes, letting his hands, indeed his entire body, drift free in the water, slow-sinking. Be as the water, he reminds himself. Do not rise to counter-anger, to accusations. Be what his king needs. Sometimes that takes the form of simply being the recipient for yelling.

“I _trusted you_ ,” more coral, breaking, shattering, “and you're no better than he is, you-- the, the first time I do something you don't like, you-- _mock_ me, you-- damn you, Vulko, _damn_ you!”

His slippered feet touch the sand-and-coral-gravel beneath. Vulko turns to face Orm; his hands spread lightly at his sides, empty. _Here I am._

“All men, and all women, will someday fail your trust,” he says, quietly. “That is a lesson you must learn, as a king. But not all will _mean_ to do so. And that distinction is important: to learn that some do so out of malice, and others simply... fail.”

Orm gives him a look of dull and tired loathing from the midst of a murky cloud of pulverized coral dust. “If you say the word 'king' once more to me tonight I will scream.”

“...very well, my-- very well.”

“Or _lesson._ Or _learn._ Is there no end to you as teacher, Vulko? Is there no end to your insufferable wisdom?”

“...it is my role, s--”

“ 'Sire' is out as well!”

“...”

  
“...”

They stand like that, facing each other, Orm with his aimless anger, Vulko with a scalp that yet throbs and a fine brewing headache. Finally Vulko toes off from the seafloor, and glides through the water until he can sit on the coral, perched next to where Orm stands, hands clasped together in his lap.

“Orm. You should have told me it was your first time,” he says, and Orm flushes once again.

“It was nothing of the sort,” he snaps.

Vulko doesn't bother to call out the lie. He stares off over the irregular borders of this particular reef, designed by their ancestors; perhaps Orvax's great-great-great-grandfather ordered this one planted and tended. Orm's fists have shattered perhaps a decade's worth of growth in minutes.

Perhaps Orm's thoughts follow a similar model, for he bends to pick up one of the larger staghorn fragments and turn it over wordlessly in his hands. The king grimaces.

For a minute or so they say nothing, and Orm tosses the coral chunk back onto the reef; if any larvae are yet active in it they will not have far to go, at least. The king crosses his arms, and leans against the coral next to Vulko, and says (in tones he no doubt means to be short and crisp but come out rather peeved): “What _difference_ would it have possibly made?”

(Don't chuckle, Vulko tells himself. Do not chuckle.) He fiddles with a seam on his trousers instead.

“I would have approached it differently. I certainly would't have said-- all that I said.”

Orm huffs. “Well perhaps I thought you already knew, as you know _everything_.”

He chuckles. (Damn it.) “Not everything. For instance, I am at a loss as to understand... why? Why have you waited? You're more than handsome enough. Surely there has been no shortage of lovely young women your own age-- or men even-- who would have been eager for the prince's attentions...”

Orm's jaw clenches, and he looks away. “Yes, of course there are. The _prince's_ attentions. And what will they want in exchange for catching my eye? What heights will they try to use my bed to reach? What favors will I be asked to grant, in what entanglements will I find myself mired? Even if it's a mere servant-- will I be blackmailed? Everyone always _wants_ something, Vulko. It will only be worse now that I am king.”

Vulko has nothing to say to that. Orm is entirely right, and he had not realized that Orm was wise enough to see it: there is nobody he might have bedded who might not have seen his affections as something to be leveraged, exploited. Orm has never had the luxury of being anonymous. Vulko opens his mouth, to attempt some comfort perhaps, but Orm isn't done.

“And now that I am king-- I must think of Y'mera.” Orm stares at nothing, his jaw working in little clenches. “The sooner the marriage is agreed and the sooner a heir conceived, the better. It signals stability, it establishes a clear line of succession before any of the cousins can get ideas...” (It's all certainly true, Vulko thinks-- it's thoughts he himself has had before-- but it is one thing to think it as the king's adviser, and it is something else, something bitter and painful, to hear Orm discuss his own impending family so dispassionately.)

“...and I refuse to go to the royal bedchamber wholly ignorant. Or incompetent. I thought--”

Another clench of that strong, pale jaw. “I thought... everything wants something from me. Except you. I don't,” Orm swallows, “I don't have to question your loyalty. Or your discretion. You've given me those all my life.”

Vulko inhales, soft and slow. “I was safe,” he murmurs, and Orm hesitates, before nodding. Vulko closes his eyes. Well, he thinks, that serves him rightly enough. _That_ is answer enough to the ego of a man old enough to know better, a man who is supposed to be clever. He clears his throat.

“I certainly could have handled it better. I am sorry, Orm. I can say only that I was... distracted, blinded somewhat from my... usual omniscience.”

Orm snorts. “Blinded by _what_ , the sight of my naked body? I'm so certain.”

Vulko doesn't answer immediately; he arches his spine back and lets his head continue the motion, gazing upward. The waters are shallow here; the coral cannot survive too much cold. They are no more than ten meters below the surface, and far overhead there is the pale glow of a watercolor moon, the waves glistening above them with silvered light like an ever-shifting ceiling dotted with luminescent sparks. Vulko gazes up at this sight, letting the beauty of it soothe his own stung pride. It makes it easier to continue speaking.

“...I thought...”

(Still not _perfectly_ easy. Ah, be as the water, Nuidis Vulko; it has no pride!)

He forces a smile, and the old wryness into his tone. “I made more of your request than was there, I'm afraid. I'm only a man, Orm. When you...”

He is peripherally aware Orm is staring at him, brows furrowed. There is no way to say this that doesn't sound self-pitying, Vulko supposes; so be it, then. “I read your actions as passion... as desire. I responded in kind. I thought you were seeking a lover.”

Orm's brows draw further together, and his eyes darken, like a building storm. “I _was.”_

Vulko smiles a toothache smile, and places a gentle hand on Orm's wrist. “You were seeking a _teacher_ , Orm. A safe and loyal one. By your own admission, I fit the criteria. I am honored by your trust; I will serve you as--”

He has a split second's warning before Orm lunges at him. It isn't enough. This close, he cannot dodge Orm's greater reach, and suddenly he is grabbed, Orm's large hand knotted in his tunic's front. Rough coral jammed against his back, Orm pinning him to it, glaring into his face from inches away.

“Are you blind, Vulko?! Do you think I don't know my own mind? That I want you _only_ because you are _safe_? You clever half-wit, I've had Eros-dreams about you since I was old enough to do so!”

It's the third time tonight Vulko has been speechless, and this time, Orm does not wait for him to regain his faculty of speech. Orm's mouth seizes on his own, crushing, engulfing.

It is not just his anger and his fear that Orm squeezes behind his facade, it seems: it's passion as well, and hunger, a tidal wave of the both of them. Vulko gasps and Orm's tongue takes the opening. Strong arms pin him to the irregular surface of the coral at his back, and strong hands fumble at his tunic's fastenings, and oh to be young again, Vulko thinks, because Orm is hard again against his thigh.

It takes all Vulko's self-restraint to wrench his mouth back from the force of Orm's kiss, even while his mind reels. “Well if you didn't _want_ a teacher, Orm, you _need_ one! _Listen_ to me-- we cannot-- do this-- _here.”_

Orm's eyes are blown dark with lust and anger, but the tone gets through; he looks around despite himself, his intelligence clawing for control against his libido. Here: the cultivated coral reefs that ring the inner city wall. Here: in view of... practically anyone who might chance by, for the reef by night is emptier, yes, but hardly deserted, and urchin gatherers might still come, and fisherfolk, or guards drawn to the earlier noise...

Orm sucks down a breath and forces a nod, but his voice is rasped all the way to Hades' throne when he mutters, “Where, then?”

Vulko thinks, despite his own racing pulse, the heat rekindling in his groin. He's good at that, at thinking. “My chambers,” he says at last.

“ _That_ will avoid gossip?” Orm says incredulously.

“ _Yes,”_ Vulko rejoins. “It's hardly a cause for concern for the king to consult his chief adviser, especially when he has just begun his reign. I will go first; you wait a half-hour before arriving.” Orm looks ready to argue over such a delay; Vulko forestalls him with more quick words. “--and you might dress the rest of the way, that _might_ help. Perhaps you might consider _trousers_...”

Orm blinks, and looks down at the tunic that is his current bare concession to public modesty-- it is currently, tellingly, tented-- and flushes once again.


	3. Chapter 3

Thirty minutes. It isn't enough, to chart and predict the full depths of a sea-change such as this. Vulko reaches his own quarters swiftly enough, and just as quickly he makes adjustments: a portrait of Atlanna is hidden away, secured inside his desk; some dishes he left out are shunted out of sight, and his sleeping area is tidied, because Orm is all too likely to quote his own lectures on cleanliness back at him. Is there anything else that ought be set to rights?

\--Does his home have any trace of Arthur? Of the surface world at all?

Yes: a crayon drawing, Arthur was eight, it shows a lighthouse, and stick figures meant to represent Arthur, Tom Curry, Vulko himself. Standing on the end of the dock. _We're all going to find Mom,_ Arthur had told him when he'd given it to Vulko, a dozen years gone already. Vulko had sealed it in glass; now it too must be hidden.

What of his surface books? No, they can stay; it's no secret at court that Nuidis Vulko reads the works of some human authors. It is part of what is faintly damning when he is called clever. He can justify it easily enough, he can say that one understands the enemy best by knowing how they think, and thus it is tolerated-- but it makes men such as Orvax, such as Nereus, wary. Ironic, Vulko has always thought, because there is an author among the humans, a famous one, who has put all their instinctive suspicion of him into perfect terms: _Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look / He thinks too much; such men are dangerous._

But Shakespeare can stay, and all his other favorites (Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, the Upanishads, Sun Tzu, Louis L'amour); their existence will not _surprise_ Orm, at least.

All of it done, and he has twenty minutes left to pace.

He swims the circle of his chambers to burn off this spate of unaccustomed nerves, whilst analysing every word, every touch, every exchange of the last hour. Is he mad, to be going with this current? Eros often drives men to folly. (But then, so does Pothos, too.) Shall a teacher not seem, and _be_ , an old goat of Priapus and a laughingstock as well, to sigh and swell over a boy in his charge?

But Orm is no longer any manner of boy, and the question of who is whose charge is now in flux. He is Orm's adviser, but Orm is his king. Orm is owed his obedience-- and his honesty, when it is necessary. He is obligated to try to steer Orm away from poor decisions.

 _Is_ this a poor decision, or has he simply spent so very long suppressing his own wants, his own thoughts, his own desires, for the sake of duty, that he is terrified now to find that what he _wants_ coincides now with his orders? It seems so selfish. It seems too easy.

\--It seems ridiculous that Orm can want him. That he is the safest option, oh, yes, he can certainly credit that. But _passion?_ There seems something inherently illogical about it.

His pacing is accomplishing nothing. He strips his own clothes and stows them, to busy his hands; then he settles himself crosslegged on the floor, to meditate on the nature of water and to calm himself.

He looks at his hands, where they are settled on his knees. They have a wiry strength to them, and they bear the decades of scars acquired in service of Atlantis. Here, where a Xebel soldier's blade had found its way past his guard and bit deep; here, a sequence of white dots (a shark's bite); and here higher on his forearm, a pale straight streak that serves as the souvenir for the first time he fought surfacers, and met their guns.

They are not his only scars. He is past fifty now, and has been in Atlantis's service for over thirty years; all youth serve at least two years in the military. He had chosen the scouts; unusual for one of the royal family (however extended), for it is dangerous work, and solitary, and many never return from their tasks in the dark and wild parts of the sea. There would have been more glory in the ranks of the cavalry, and more safety in the ranks of the city's garrison. He could have chosen either of those without shame, but he had been a scout.

...He had returned from a months-long salvage, deep in the Pacific, to learn that Atlanna had fled. Orvax had demanded his appearance before the court, and demanded to know where his betrothed was, and hurled accusations at him: conspiracy, treachery, was he Atlanna's secret lover?

He had only ever been her friend. What had been between them had held no lust.

And he was able to say truthfully that he did not know, where she had gone; he had not even known she meant to leave. That itself was painful: they told each other so much else, but she hadn't told him her plans. Yet he had known that that too was to spare him, to save him from the choice between her secret and his oaths of loyalty.

Just as bittersweet had been her return. The joy he had felt at seeing her again-- tempered with the sick knowledge that she had come home to be something very like a prisoner.

But he had visited her, when he could, and she had hugged him fit to crush him, and when he would have spoken of her situation Atlanna had pressed her fingers to his lips and said, _Nuidis, old friend, the walls have ears._ So instead they had spoken of every other thing under the sea: the things he had seen on his expeditions, the strangeness of the surface folk (he'd been half-appalled, half-fascinated at her descriptions of life above the waves), the intrigues at court. It was Atlanna who had first urged him to find a book by Louis L'amour, and he had asked, One of their philosophers? And she had laughed, and said that she was sure he would find wisdom there to add to his collection.

Her laughter is a wonderful memory. Orm has her laugh: near-silent, eyes crinkled, shoulders shaking with it.

Her laughter is a better memory than Atlanna seated in the elegant prison of her chambers, a tight grim smile on her lips, one hand curved at her belly. _Well, Nuidis, I am with child. An heir at last. Perhaps now he shall leave me be, for nine months._

And what to say to that, that wasn't treasonous?

He had been out of the city again, when Orvax had damned her to the Trench. Likely for the best. He would have accomplished nothing but to get himself executed alongside her, he is sure, and there has been tragedy enough already. She would not have wanted that. He is a practical man.

It's a comfort as cold as the Trench itself, but it is what he has had, the last ten years. While he has served Orvax all the same.

And what would Atlanna say now, he wonders? To see him, and her son? Would she curl her lip, call him a fool, or worse? Would she say it's a betrayal of everything she asked of him?

...no, he thinks, as he laces his fingers together, in his lap. No, she would not. That is his own self-judgment there. Atlanna... would say that the heart sets its own course, and that no map can tell you what may wait upon it.

And she would ask him if he loves her son.

There is a knock at his door.

It's his turn to start, ripped from his reveries; the minutes have flown. His heart resumes a sudden tattoo in his chest. “Who calls?”

“Vulko, it is your king. I have need of your counsel. _Urgent_ need.”

 _Oh, I am certain that you do,_ he might say, but if Orm will play the script he asked of him, then he can do no less. “Enter, sire.”

The door is wrenched open and there is Orm, dressed properly at least, still pink about the face (a blush shows so starkly on his pale skin!), looking uncertain and eager all at once. He steps in; he shuts the door.

“Seal it,” Vulko murmurs, and Orm complies hastily, and in the next second is diving toward him.

“--you're naked,” observes Orm the very-intelligent, coming to an awkward stop two feet from him; Vulko nods, and pushes off from the floor, drifts towards the salp-filled divan that serves as his bed.

“I am.”

“May I--” Orm looks unsure, “--may I touch you?”

He cannot help but be some manner of imp; he looks back at Orm over his shoulder, and says, “Are you not king...?”

Orm's hesitation flickers to an aggrieved look. “I _said_ I didn't want to hear that damned word again tonight. And I-- well-- earlier--” Orm looks down, to the patterned mosaic floor of Vulko's rooms. “--I ought have-- that is--”

So, then; his insistence on thirty minutes has given Orm time to think (time to cool down),and his insistence on his own chambers has shifted the power balance again. Even a king may hesitate, in a space that so obviously belongs to another. Vulko cannot say he is displeased with the results of his arrangements.

He rewards Orm's unfinished, halting sentence with a smile. A king must lead, yes-- but it costs nothing to be courteous to your bedmates. “We both made mistakes. Shall we start again?”

“That would please me,” says Orm, awkward and formal, and Vulko drifts through the water towards him, twisting as he goes, until he is before his king. Orm is a fine classical model of a man, shoulders broad and chest too, and he stands a head taller than Vulko himself-- because Vulko is short for one of the royal bloodline, and compact, and wiry, and has learned grace and skill primarily because he has never had the sheer strength of most of his kinsmen. (He remembers the barbed speculation when he was a youth, that his noble mother must have taken a commoner to her bed--)

“Your will is mine,” he murmurs. “Touch me if you would, Orm.”

Orm inhales, and jerks a tiny nod. The large hands come up to settle on Vulko's hips, tentatively. Orm clears his throat. Vulko gives him a slight nod in answer, and his own fingers skim upward to rest on Orm's chest, and to begin with the pearl buttons of his tunic.

This close, he can see Orm's throat bobbing with his swallows, and feel the current as Orm breathes, in and out, sending little pulses of swirling water against his face. Orm's pulse is up; his carotid visibly throbs, and Vulko wants, badly, to swim up a few inches, and press his mouth to it.

All things in their tide... For now, he undoes buttons.

Orm's hands still haven't moved. He can feel tension in them, in the roughened palms against his own sharp hipbones. He glances to Orm's face; Orm has his lower lip caught between his teeth, his eyes shut.

“...Orm?”

Orm sucks in a breath, and slits his eyes open. “I--”

“Yes?”

“--I do not want to lose control again. As I did.”

Vulko draws back. Immediate regret flares in Orm's blue eyes, so Vulko takes his hands, his wrists, hopefully before Orm can second-guess his own words too much. “Come sit with me.”

It takes another tug of Orm's wrists before the king starts to move. He coaxes him to the divan and they sink down together, side by side.

“I'm not sure you can have a release and be in _total_ control,” Vulko says carefully. (Orm looks existentially displeased by the notion.) “You can discipline yourself, though. With practice.”

Orm raises his chin, attempts to look dignified. “...I suppose I will need a great deal of practice.”

Easy to take at face value. Only his long experience of Orm lets him read the bland statement as what it is: half self-deprecating joke, half innuendo. Vulko smiles despite himself, a flash of his own keen teeth.

“And a teacher,” he says just as blandly. Orm's eyes narrow at him, and for a moment he thinks he has teased Orm that fraction too much-- but then his king laughs, the silent laugh.

“And what if I happen to teach _you_ things, Vulko?”

“Oh, I hope to learn for as long as I may live... my king.”

He lifts Orm's hand then, the hand he is still holding, and bends his dark head to it as well. Orm's knuckles beneath his lips are solid, the skin on the back of his hand smooth, the pulse in his wrist tangible. He presses his cheek to Orm's hand, his own eyes shut. How complicated the heart, he thinks. How tangled the currents that play together in him now, that base lust merges with his sworn loyalties. That he can want to gently shepherd his sometime student through these new waters, and also want-- at the same time-- his ruler to bugger him senseless.

All things in their tide, Vulko reminds himself. He turns Orm's hand in his own, kisses at his inner wrist, along his forearm, and after a few seconds Orm takes the unspoken prompting: the large hand curls at the back of his skull, sliding into his hair a second time. He nods, fractionally. _Yes, good._

It is not that Orm is passive, but that Orm waits and watches and learns. He has seen it in Orm the last decade, as childishness has given way to a tactical mind in the making. Orm loathes to make mistakes, loathes to embark on anything that might make him seem the fool, and prefers to let the enemy make the first move. But only give him encouragement, a sign that he is on the right path-- kiss him now, here on his inner elbow-- and he will swim...

Orm's other hand comes into play, on cue. It settles on his shoulder, careful at first and then heavier, the full weight of it resting there. The ball of Orm's thumb drags across the sharp line of his collarbone, testingly, and Vulko exhales water against Orm's arm.

“What would you do with me?” he asks, and in between words his tongue emerges, tastes the salt-smooth of Orm's skin right here, where it is thin and soft and the blood is near beneath it. He feels rather than hears Orm's tiny hiss.

“I would-- fuck you,” Orm whispers, and the iron rasp in his voice runs straight down Vulko's spine to his nethers. And there's the profanity. As few as five years ago he might have reprimanded Orm for saying the word-- but Orm would never have, around his elders. It sounds _very_ wrong, from those lips. Wrong in a way that blooms like a lava vent in his belly.

“How?” he answers, mouthing up Orm's bicep, his lips, his tongue, his teeth moving in ghost-like nibbles against the muscle of his arm. “Tell me.”

The large hand on his shoulder tightens; the one in his hair moves to cradle the back of his skull, fingers splayed.

“However would leave you remembering it most.”

It's a good bluff, Vulko thinks: it's a very good bluff, because he groans at the sheer image of it, at the idea of swimming sore the next day, or walking with a limp and having to make up some believable excuse to the polite queries of others. But the vagueness gives it away.

“Against the wall?” he teases/offers/introduces-the-concept. Orm growls wordless assent.

“Bent over my own desk?” he drawls, and his mouth is now at Orm's shoulder, worrying the edge of the sleeveless tunic. Orm's hands tighten upon him.

“The floor, like beasts,” he continues, and Orm inhales, and Vulko lunges with his mouth to press his lips to Orm's strong throat, a kiss that's half a bite, and--

“Or perhaps we'd be so civilized as to do it on the bed,” he says right into Orm's ear, and Orm answers by crushing then bodily together, a forearm like iron at the small of his bared back, whatever words Orm might have said muffled against his own shoulder. Vulko breathes, his green eyes slitted, one of his hands circling around to Orm's broad back to rake his nails down Orm's spine, through the snug, scale-patterned fabric of his shirt.

He'd _like_ to do gentle. He'd like to show Orm the slow ways of pleasure, how to tease and coax and seduce, how to evoke a slow-building whirlpool in the belly of your lover.

But maybe later.

Right now-- right now he is busy, twisting in the water, straddling Orm's lap and the hard bulge in his trousers. Orm's white teeth bare in a hiss, and he bucks up instinctively at the weight and pressure on his lap. And Vulko rides with it, rolling his hips and bared ass back against Orm, slow and deliberate. His king's face is a sight: nostrils flaring as he drags in draughts of water, his eyes near-black with the thinnest ring of blue-gray around his dilated pupils. Lovely: he cups Orm's strong jaw in both his hands, strokes Orm's cheekbones with his thumbs, and leans in to kiss him.

A salt kiss, only a trace of hesitation on Orm's part and gone in no more time than it takes for a wave to break. Then tongues, sliding-slipping against each other, everything smooth in the water, liquid and hot, and when Orm pushes more aggressively, tries to take control of the kiss, Vulko accepts it eagerly, parts his lips further, gives his mouth to his king, gives and gives as he has given of his time and his skills all his life.

They part at last, foreheads resting against each other. Vulko says, “Do you know what I would with _you?”_

“No,” says Orm, his voice roughened to the abrading texture of coral. It's delicious. “Tell me.”

“I would get your damned clothes off,” Vulko says, and Orm laughs, and reaches for his tunic himself, but so does Vulko, and together their hands tangle and get in each other's way. The new king makes a deeply annoyed noise in his throat; Vulko says, _Let me,_ and Orm does. Orm instead takes the chance to touch him again, to run his hands testingly down Vulko's lean chest, watching him for reactions-- reactions Vulko is more than pleased to let him see: his own eyelashes fluttering, his own mouth shaping moans.

And then finally he gets the king's tunic off him, and for the second time tonight he's confronted with the view of Orm's chest, smooth and sculpted, perfect as genetics and all his rigorous training could make him. (Orm will marry Y'mera, and Orm will apparently fuck him, but Vulko thinks that Orm's true lover is perfection, that he pursues and courts it the way other men pursue a woman.) Vulko sighs his appreciation for what is before his eyes, under his hands. He splays his own callused palms on the other man's chest and looks at him from under his lashes.

“You're magnificent.”

Orm colors for the third or the fourth or is it fifth time tonight, and Vulko thinks that it won't be that many more years before Orm is too self-assured to do that anymore, that such compliments will eventually evoke only a courteous thank you, some polite counter-compliment: that's a shame, because Orm blushes beautifully. But it's to be expected, once Orm sheds the last vestiges of the boy he was. Nothing lasts forever.

He slides his hands further down, along Orm's washboard of a stomach, muscular power buried just under that taut and flawless skin. And finally here's the sharkskin edge of his trousers, where Vulko, whose fingers are nearly as clever as his tongue, makes swift work of the laces, while Orm watches him through half-lidded eyes and jerks his hips in tiny, barely-restrained circles.

And then it's flesh on flesh, Orm's shaft straining into his hand, Vulko a slim hard answering curve against him, the water of Vulko's chambers warm around them both, sliding against each other, sliding slipping wet and fluid, Vulko's hand tight around them both, Orm's hands tighter yet on his hips, _yes_ he whispers, Orm moves him with that powerful grip, and Vulko nods and lets his forehead fall against the broad shoulder of his king and rides against him, with him, and if Orm's fingers dig in so hard that he will have bruises on his hips then this too is but one more mark on his body in the service of Atlantis, and therein dwells his honor and his pride.

***

“I can't show you much of how to please the princess, or any other woman, I'm afraid,” Vulko says some minutes later. They are lying side by side on the divan, Orm on his back, Vulko half-propped-up, one hand stroking through the silver-gold of Orm's hair, massaging his scalp. (Orm had looked ready to take offense when he had first started touching, but he'd said, _just trust me, see if you like it,_ and that was three minutes ago and Orm's eyes are half-shut with a new-found pleasure and Vulko thinks how badly Orm has isolated himself, drawn defensively within the shell of his rank. For this simple hedonism to be new to him.)

“Hrmn?” asks Orm, and focuses with some effort. “What?”

“I've no experience with women,” Vulko clarifies, gently raking his nails over Orm's skull. The king's eyes close again. Then open.

“What, never?”

Vulko lifts one shoulder slightly. “I find men to be lovelier. And I have three prolific siblings: the line of Vulko hasn't failed, for my proclivities.”

Orm gives the suggestion of a nod, his eyes sliding unfocused once again. Perhaps he's consulting the genealogies in his head, locating Nuidis' nieces and nephews upon the sprawling (and often intertwined) trees that the nobility learn right along with hunting and swimming. Perhaps. Perhaps he is simply relaxed, too flooded with the aftermath of sex to consider the political. Some part of Vulko hopes for the latter.

But when Orm speaks, it's to say, “Then you and my mother never...”

Vulko's hand stills, for a moment. “Did you think we had?”

Orm has the grace to look somewhat abashed, at least. “There are many things said about you at court.”

He cannot help but smile, half-wry, half-bitter. “True enough.”

The king turns a little, half to face him, catching Vulko's hand in his own and placing them palm to palm, measuring size against size. Orm's hand is larger, broader.

“You're not often linked with any names at court these days, though.”

“No,” Vulko agrees. “As you said, I am discreet. I take my pleasure with those I won't have to meet at the council table, by and large.”

Orm's eyes flick up to his. “--what, with the common citizens?”

“Often,” he admits, and something flickers in Orm's gaze that might be revulsion, or perhaps just bemusement. And he knows the next question, the one that follows on that, the one about whether that other rumor about Nuidis Vulko is true, so he forestalls it.

“I have no idea if my mother did the same or not. I've never asked her. Would it bother you, if I wasn't strictly highborn?”

Orm opens his mouth, and then shuts it, brows furrowed. The wheels turn behind the blue-gray eyes, and Vulko is pleased to see it: a teacher should always make his student think. And an advisor should do the same for his king, and keep him from ever getting too set in his assumptions, his judgments.

“Would you think less of me?” he presses lightly, while tangling their fingers together, stroking his thumb along Orm's.

Orm's frown deepens. “It's... an absurd question. You would by definition _be_ less. The noble bloodlines are provably stronger.”

“How lessened am I? Hypothetically,” Vulko counters, in the easy rhythm of their rhetoric classes. “I can still breathe the surface air. Would you say my intelligence has suffered? My skill at arms?”

Orm makes a face at him, at his intentionally absurd arguments. “Of course not.”

“Of course, I'm not the prettiest at court,” Vulko continues, half-teasing. “Or the tallest, or the strongest. I surely do not have the best singing voice. Are these things the manifestation of my weakness?”

The king's annoyance flickers to something more edged; he pulls his hand away, and Vulko lets him. “Don't be ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with you. The rumor is obviously nothing but froth and foam, spread by those jealous of your rank.” Orm sits up, and runs a hand through his hair, then looks back down to Vulko, places a hand on his arm.

“I don't believe them, Vulko,” the king says, and he means it _kindly_ , he means it to be reassuring. So there is nothing Vulko can do to that but smile, and give no voice to his own salt. Orm will hardly unlearn a lifetime of everything everyone else has taught him in the course of one night's pleasure.

He feels suddenly tired: if Orm is so entrenched even when it comes to the castes of Atlantis, then is it even possible to shift his paradigm regarding humans, regarding Arthur? Children can entertain new ideas, but Orm is no longer a child. Like the coral reef extruding its brittle skeleton, each day that goes by will see King Orm harden further in his views. Vulko is fighting an inexorable clock.

But he promised Atlanna. That he would help her sons. He can think of nothing she would have wanted more than that her children might not hate one another.

“What are your thoughts?” Orm says, interrupting his reverie. Vulko focuses to see Orm gazing keenly at him.

Vulko chuckles. “You're very curious tonight.”

“You're a curiosity,” Orm rejoins, and traces his knuckles against Vulko's lean-sinewed chest. “There is nobody else at court-- quite like you.”

“Is that why you desire me?” he half-teases.

“It's part of it,” Orm admits with a smile as keen as an shark's tooth. “You know I've always enjoyed puzzles, Vulko.” A moment's hesitation. “--or should I call you by your personal name, now?” (Where 'now' encompasses this, their mutual nakedness, their bodies tangled together.)

Vulko laces his hands behind his head, gazing at Orm above him. “You should call me what suits you best.”

“Nuidis,” Orm says after a few seconds' pause. He weighs the taste of it on his tongue, uncertain. “Nuidis. It sounds... strange. In my mind you're Vulko.”

“Then I'm Vulko,” he answers, with an easy shrug. “A name is only that.”

“You and your truisms,” Orm says, and rolls his eyes, and bends down to kiss him. And for a little while they do nothing but that, and Vulko is not displeased with that, not by far, because Orm's weight atop him is delicious and the both of them are more patient now with the first breakers behind them. This time it is slower. This time he shows Orm the play of it, kissing and pulling back, soft, mouth dancing against his, little darting flickers of tongue that ever retreat, like a silver minnow, flash-flash-gone, and when Orm growls against his mouth at the maddening tease of it and tries to hold him still, then he whispers, _No, you can use this too. Deftness rather than power, teasing rather than taking. It's a tool. Try it--_

Orm has always been a quick student.

He gives Orm his reactions here as well, willingly: it's possible that with his eventual queen Orm will have to play games of Eros-at-war, and Xebellans are notoriously competitive. But here and now, Orm doesn't need to battle to earn his responses: he _gives_ them, he gives himself up to them, he sinks into the sensations and the heat. So he moans, and chases Orm's deliberately teasing mouth, and lets Orm taste this form of power too. Orm draws back, and holds him down when he would follow, and he obligingly groans with longing, and Orm smiles, pleased, pleased as he has always been to discover a new edge.

So it goes. The same principles apply with bodies. Like this, Orm: you did not know, my king, that your wrist was so sensitive, or your throat, did you? See the difference, Orm, between a hungry sucking and a light taunting with lips and teeth? Deftness rather than power, the way of water.

Sometimes power is what is needful, Orm answers with a glint in his eye. And the ocean has power in plenty.

It's true, Vulko has to admit. Water can yield, flow around, erode through long persistence-- or water can batter and overwhelm. Water has many ways.

He has only to show Orm a thing once before Orm turns it back on him, as he'd expected. He kisses at Orm's chest and it's all the hint Orm needs to set to on his own, to leave him marked there as well, nipples dark and swollen and bruised, his collarbones wealed with tiny scratches from his king's predatory teeth. He returns to Orm's groin, for a slower and more graceful meeting than the first time, and even as Orm bucks with pleasure he knows that Orm is filing it all away, noting everything he does. And he's right, Orm repays him, Orm doubles down with such an intensity that he nearly chokes, and Vulko has to stop him, hands on either side of his king's face.

“That one takes a great deal of practice,” he says, wry and breathless. “Start with what's comfortable. Don't push yourself too far.”

Orm, whose life has been a relentless series of milestones to achieve, accomplishments to master, gives him a wordless but perfectly communicative look at that, and wrenches Vulko's hands away, in order to go back to just what he's doing. Well, he can't _force_ the king to take his wise counsel, he thinks with whimsy, and curls his fingers in Orm's hair as Orm does his damndest to engulf him whole.

So it goes.

The clock that ticks in his bedchamber (an abalone face, hands made of beaten gold) shows nearly dawn when Orm opens his eyes again from a half-doze, finds his gaze, and says, “I still wish to fuck you.”

(Dawn: much more relevant above the surface of course, but even underwater it still matters. The shallows will be lit with it, the ocean warmed by the sun, the currents and the fish respond, and even into the thermocline its secondary effects are still felt. Orm is like the sun, Vulko thinks: his full attention is a fierce light that heats what is beneath it, affecting everything else in a chain reaction.)

He doesn't answer with words immediately, but brushes his knuckles against Orm's throat, his steady pulse. It twitches, throbs, a thing alive. His other hand gestures languidly around his home, indicating in a wave all the places he teased Orm with earlier. “Have you settled on a place, then?”

Orm keeps their eyes locked but darts his head to the side, capturing Vulko's wrist in his mouth to press the smooth skin there ever so lightly with his teeth. A little tattoo of his tongue, and then release. (The tricks he's taught Orm, all night, now part of Orm's armory.) He lets himself sigh, and squirm, and the king smiles, sleek and satisfied as a seal.

“What place and manner do you recommend?”

He molds his fingers to Orm's jaw. “It is your choice,” he breathes, because ultimately, that is what it is, being king. It is choice after choice after choice, and one can consult one's advisers, one's teachers, and if the gods are kind then Orm will have good advice and good advisers. But there will come moments where no advice can guide Orm Marius, where the burden of choice will come down to him and him alone. Let Orm learn it now, in so trivial a thing as this.

Orm hesitates, the old fear of failure flickering in his ocean-gray eyes. Vulko watches him, wordless, his own gaze neutral, waiting, accepting. The sand before the surf, eternally receiving.

Orm searches his face for a clue as to the correct answer, but it is Vulko's turn to be the statue.

For one second he thinks Orm's nerve might fail him-- but neither Orvax nor Atlanna were ever known for being short on nerve, and the king is the son of his parents. Orm sets his jaw, and smiles, handsome and regal, everything he has been the last seven-day for his new subjects.

“The bed, then. We are civilized, after all,” Orm says.

“Very good, sire.”

Orm grins-- white and broad, an open smile such as he cannot recall seeing on Orm's face in years-- and adds on, his eyes dancing now, “And I might always need your-- urgent counsel-- in other matters, on other nights, after all.”

He laughs despite himself, and his own laugh is a raspy thing, little used. “You might, my king. You well might.”

So he rolls onto his belly for Orm, and gives his counsel: breach a partner thusly, slowly, lead not with the full force at one's command but an expeditional foray... mouth, fingers, tongue. Ease the passage with what is available. Slow. Learn the terrain.

“I can tell you were a scout,” Orm snorts from behind him, and Vulko would answer something with something clever but Orm's thick thumb has just curled inside him and it does much to rob him of speech.

“And after the scouts have secured my passage, I arrive in state with my trident,” Orm murmurs, and the thumb withdraws. Vulko snorts.

“Is _that_ what you call it?” he cannot help but quip; Orm answers with a stinging slap that leaves him groaning, flexing the muscle of the buttock just struck.

“I shall call it what I like,” Orm says airily, and Vulko is seized with a precognition that this, too, is one of the things that Orm will lose, as a man and a king: this ability to laugh at himself, even a little. It has never been Orm's strong point, but the gods know it will dry up even faster with a crown to choke it. Like Orm's blushing, it is a shame. Perhaps with the two of them alone, he can preserve such things a little longer.

“ _Yes,_ sire.”

So then it is not Orm's fingers, however broad or callused, but Orm's cock, and Vulko takes a full breath of the sea around them before expelling it slow, sinking his body down boneless into the yielding cushion of his bed. Deliberate relaxation, deliberate openness, because the gods know Orm will be tense enough for the both of them.

He feels/hears Orm's sharp little inhale, and he certainly feels Orm's fingers gripping at his hips, digging in near painfully. “So tight,” Orm says, all strained. “Vulko, I will _not_ fit--”

“You will, Orm,” he reassures. “I am ready. And your.. trident is not so large as that, I promise you.”

Orm breathes like a bellows, but Vulko is relaxed as all his meditation can make him. Bit by bit, and Vulko sighs at the intrusion, the inarguable presence of another inside him, forcing accommodation for himself.

“Yes, that's good, Orm, that's very good.”

Orm doesn't spare breath on speech. He makes a noise, raw and strangled, but he restrains himself all the way, torturous inch by inch in, until at last he's hilted deep. His hands on Vulko's narrow hips shake with little tremors.

“I am going to take you now,” Orm says through what sound like clenched teeth, and Vulko gazes at his chamber wall, where hangs his clock, where hang various honors he has earned over the years: a Coral Heart, the shark tooth of his office as a warden, his curved scout's sword, given him by Orvax himself. The mementos of his lifetime of service.

“I'm already yours.”

***

Orm's weight is heavy atop him, a great blanket of muscle. It's pleasant. Vulko feels no need to move, though soon, they should. Soon, Orm should dress, and make sure that the scent of their rutting has left him, and be back in his own chambers before the palace truly stirs. Soon.

Orm seems to be in no more hurry than he is. Orm nuzzles in an aimless and half-awake way at the nape of his neck, his drifting hair.

“Has my service pleased you?” he can't help but ask, his lips curling.

“Nngghh,” the king responds with great eloquence.

“I will take that as a yes. A veritable commendation, perhaps.”

“I'll have a new medal commissioned immediately,” Orm says into his shoulder, and again he chuckles. Orm groans.

“When you do that-- I feel it all around my cock, damn it.”

“Good, isn't it?”

“Ridiculously good.”

The clock ticks on and on; even royalty can't stop its progress. Vulko watches the smallest hand spining around. “You should get dressed, soon.”

Orm sighs, deeply put-upon, but kisses once at his shoulder, and hesitates, and then touches, carefully, the spot on Vulko's head that's still tender and has somewhat less hairs than it did yesterday. The king's fingers trace the spot, and then Orm leans in and presses a tentative kiss just next to it.

“You are a good teacher, Vulko. Nuidis.”

Orm lifts off him, and Vulko slowly turns himself to face Orm, draw his fingers against Orm's chest in one last touch.

“I have had a remarkable student.”

And while it is very true that compliments may soon cease to mean as much to Orm Marius, King of Atlantis, may soon cease to make him smile or blush-- for at least once more they still have their power, because Orm does smile, the shy smile, and he does blush, so beautifully.

The future is unknown. But in this moment, Vulko thinks that, yes, he certainly could tell Atlanna that he loves her son. A bittersweet love, a love that has undergone transmutations of alchemy over the years. But it is love.

_Gods, I pray you that it be enough, and that you make Orm kind and wise, for I have done all that I can._


End file.
